She blinked. Nilus was standing next to her, holding her arm and shoulder, looking at her with black eyes in a pale, pale face. The face of a friend. The rest of the world had become blurred, a tableau through which something was moving faster than sight, clawed and furred and toothed. Slowly – oh so slowly – the yellow-armoured warriors were coming apart.

Red… The world was bright and dark and red.

‘But you were not here…’ she said, looking at the face of the Navigator standing just next to her. There was blood on his face she noticed, splattered right across him, bright and dripping.

Nilus shrugged, smiled, and now he looked nothing like a human, and nothing like a friend.

‘I am always here,’ he said. ‘I am the man beside you.’

Inner System Gulf

The comet shrine blazed back into being. Light poured out of the point where it had vanished. Lightning leaped across the gulfs of space, brighter than the vanished sunlight. Every soul asleep under the light of the sun woke with a cry. Every person awake, from Space Marine to child, felt the touch of knives on their skin.

A vortex of energy poured into the hole punched through reality by the comet. Circling daemons were caught by the hurricane force and were unmade. The storm narrowed, became a point, became a blade. It dragged through the skin of reality, ripping back along the arc that the comet shrine had passed in the last decades. The lips of the wound peeled back. The light of paradox spilled out, bubbling, flowing, curdling the dark across tens of millions of kilometres. The warp breach gaped, drooling half-formed matter, a bloody smile opening in the dark.

For an instant, it was the only thing that moved. Stars and planets were still in the face of this violation. The black sun hung in a bleached sky, a mute and cold disc.

Then the slit tore wide. Matter vomited into being. Half-formed ideas of teeth and limbs, of beasts and mouths tumbled over each other, writhing as they dissolved and coagulated.

The sun blazed back to light, screaming.

Across Terra, every person looking at the sky could see it: a burning wound across the night, or a scar of midnight in the daylight.